3delight 9.0 released!!

[AMDx64BT]

http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php/download/step_1

[AMDx64BT]

The CHANGES file included with the new release:

3delight 9.0 and 3delight for maya 5.0

December 2009

New Unlimited-threads License

* A new unlimited-threads license is now available for both
the 3Delight standalone renderer and the 3Delight for Maya plug-in.
Clients that purchased the 8-thread license (and under yearly support)
are automatically upgraded to unlimited-threads. The 8-thread license
will no longer be available, but the 4-threads and 2-threads will
continue to be available at a reduced pricing.


3Delight For Maya

* Introducing RIB Fragments: a user-friendly and flexible way
of creating and managing RIB archives. This feature is useful to
accelerate re-renders.
* The display drivers UI has been improved and simplified
making it easier to manage and visualize output variables (AOVs).
“Primary Displays” and “Secondary Displays” have been collapsed into
the same UI.
* Major performance improvements to the 3Delight Relationship
Editor which make it responsive even with very large scenes.
* Improved UI in the 3Delight Relationship Editor by using
distinctive icons for different shaders and attributes.
* Added support for many useful Hypershade nodes, most
importantly: misss shaders, car paint, metallic paint, glossy
reflection and glossy refraction.
* Scene parsing optimizations reduce RIB output time by 20%.
* It is now possible to render Shave and a Haircut nodes
without loading the 3dfmShave plug-in: 3Delight for Maya automatically
uses Shave plug-in's RIB export function in that case.
* Maya sprite particles can now be rendered as “volumes” for
correct shadowing.
* Maya fluids implementation enters a beta stage. All current
limitations are listed in the user's manual in the Rendering
Guidelines chapter.
* Added Maya 2010 support and dropped Maya 8.0 support.


3Delight Features

* Introducing multi-camera rendering. This features enables
the output of many camera views from a single render. This
functionality is especially useful for stereo rendering as it saves
rendering time.
* Improvements to point-based occlusion quality: concave
corners are rendered more accurately.
* The subsurface shadeop can proceed from a point-cloud file.
This can save a potentially costly pre-processing step when rendering
sequences.
* Billboard particles can now be rendered with a “thickness”
for correct shadow casting.
* Network caching, a feature unique to 3Delight, is now
available on Windows systems.
* Added detailed memory statistics to 3Delight to better track
memory usage.


3Delight Performance

* Improved performance of occlusion() and indirectdiffuse()
shadeops when rendering dense meshes. Speedups can reach 200%.
* Improved multi-threading performance on scenes containing
procedural geometry (such as delayed read archives). Procedurals are
now allowed to execute in parallel which can lead to speed
improvements linear to the number of threads used.
* Accelerated point-based occlusion as it now supports the
“irradiance shadingrate”. Speedups with default settings are in the
range of 200% to 300%.
* Improved multi-threading performance and memory consumption
of subsurface scattering algorithm.
* Improved deep shadow map creation performance. On large
shadow maps, performance increases linearly with the number of cores.
Temporary disk space usage during DSM creation has been reduced three-
folds.
* A new memory allocation scheme in the ray-tracer
significantly lowers memory consumption when rendering object: only
one object instance is kept in memory at any time. This feature is
enabled through a special variable.
* Improved point-cloud loading time. This has a positive
performance impact on effects such as point-based occlusion and color
bleeding.


Shader Compiler

* RSL 2.0 improvements including resizeable arrays, better
supports for shader classes and more efficient execution.


Pipeline & API

* Introducing the “VolumeTracer” API. This RSL plug-in allows
user to easily write volume renderers.
* The “Sx” shader evaluation API is now embedded with the
3Delight library (takes a single 3Delight license when used).
* Added “Implicit Field” plug-in support (extension to the
RiBlobby primitive).
* Display drivers can now access 3Delight's deep frame buffer
which provides the list of visible surfaces for each pixel sample.
* Added new entries to the Ptc API and fixed compatibility
issues.
* RiNuCurves now support vertex normals.